RE: Articulating and Establishing a Vision for Technical Publications

Subject: RE: Articulating and Establishing a Vision for Technical Publications
From: "McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>
To: "jimmy -at- breck-mckye -dot- com" <jimmy -at- breck-mckye -dot- com>, "techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 10:06:21 -0400

Pardon my frankness, but I think that last bit is nonsense.

It works the other way around.

You start out documenting your own product, and you document the ways that you think it can be used, in order to address the largest possible market. Actually, you might document fewer ways than you can imagine, since PLM has already decided which use-cases make economic sense to test - and therefore to officially support. You, and your customers, are better off if you don't document for public consumption until the use-case is tested and can be supported by Tech Support.

THEN, your customers start showing you uses of your own product that you never imagined anyone would do.
THEN, you document those, too.
And the cycle continues until your product ages out.

Your customers will already have imagined any use-case that is suggested or implied by the sales bumpf, your corporate web site, and their contact with Sales and Professional Services... in other words, any use-case that your company already officially knows about. (*)

So, in that context, the best thing a writer can do is to maintain contact with the [Pre-] Sales Engineers, the Tech Support people, and the Professional Services people, all of whom are exposed to customers finding novel uses for your product(s), and figuring out the details of making those use-cases a reality.

With respect to the OP's question... sorry... I'm not up to converting that into a pre-packaged vision thing, this morning. :-)

(*) We don't, but if you have a public user-to-user support forum, THAT venue might provide some novel suggestions and use cases.

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From: jimmy -at- breck-mckye -dot- com


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References:
Articulating and Establishing a Vision for Technical Publications: From: Lois Patterson
Re: Articulating and Establishing a Vision for Technical Publications: From: jimmy

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